Read his own words and see what he thinks is “the most important part” of the announcement of a major scientific milestone. He’s welcome to his own religious beliefs; the problem is that he has the arrogance to think they need to be trumpeted as part of the science.
Only this is the good kind, addressing a problem with power and honesty, and providing a personal connection. This is the testimony of a victim of the Irish Catholic workhouse system, and the brutal pedophilia of corrupt priests.
I found this on the blog of one of the creators of the Father Ted series, Graham Linehan, who wrote of this:
If all copies and records of ‘Father Ted’ were somehow wiped, I would find it impossible to summon up the affection with which Arthur and I initially wrote the show. Somehow, these days, The Irish Catholic Church seems a lot less cuddly.
I may have sold Francis Collins short. He may be a useful agent in the battle against creationism, but not in the way he probably intends.
The Discovery Institute – the Seattle-based headquarters of the intelligent design movement – has just launched a new website, Faith and Evolution, which asks, can one be a Christian and accept evolution? The answer, as far as the Discovery Institute is concerned, is a resounding: No.
The new website appears to be a response to the recent launch of the BioLogos Foundation, the brainchild of geneticist Francis Collins, former head of the Human Genome Project and rumoured Obama appointee-to-be for head of the National Institutes of Health. Along with “a team of scientists who believe in God” and some cash from the Templeton Foundation, Collins, an evangelical Christian who is also a staunch proponent of evolution, is on a crusade to convince believers that faith and science need not be at odds. He is promoting “theistic evolution” – the belief that God (the prayer-listening, proactive, personal God of Christianity) chose to create life by way of evolution.
Hmmm. So two titans of the credulous and ignorant are battling it out for turf? This may be Collins’ true strength here, that he speaks the language of the gullible as a native.
I know that in the past the Discovery Institute has been particularly damning of Ken Miller: he also speaks that same language, and is in competition for the same niche as the DI fellows. Collins is apparently even worse, since he has now driven the DI to flamboyantly and publicly admit that their whole scheme is aimed at shilling for religion, and that their argument is that evolution, even the hobbled version of Collins and Miller, is incompatible with god-belief.
I hope the NCSE and various lawyers have snapped an archival copy of the entire “Faith and Evolution” website — it will be so useful in the next ID trial.
It’s an aggressively dishonest site, too. It consists of lots of people claiming that modern scientific evidence points more strongly than ever to a cosmic designer, which is a flat lie — finding natural mechanisms for complex processes means their designer god is increasingly superfluous. And Wells, that fraudulent pseudo-scholar, trots out the idiotic ‘we believe in microevolution, the rest has no evidence’ argument. That’s long been the hallmark of ignorant people who know nothing of the wealth of evidence beyond a few small scale, well-documented instances. It’s also nothing but a rhetorical ploy, where they concede a few points to appear more reasonable in their denial of other, equally well supported cases.
This is a song called Alone in the Universe, and it’s not what I thought it was about at first. I had to laugh.
It’s perfectly safe for work, unless you listen to the lyrics carefully.
Some days, I think other people must be aliens. Or I must be. For instance, there’s a lot of noise right now about this article analyzing the future of information and media that, if you read the comments, you will discover that people are praising to an astonishing degree. I looked at it and saw this graph:
And my bullshit detector went insane. It’s supposed to be saying something about where people are and will be getting their information, but there’s no information about where this information came from, and it’s meaningless!
Way back in high school, I had this excellent chemistry teacher, Mr Thompson, who taught me the only worthwhile stuff I got out of my science classes in those years. He was really big on thinking — I know, a real radical — and he didn’t have us simply plug-and-chug through basic chemistry problems, he forced us to work out why we were doing what we were doing. For instance, he did simple things like make us put away our slide rules (that’s how long ago this was) and pencils and think through a problem, getting a ballpark estimate in our heads for the magnitude of the answer, and then we’d work through the details of the solution. (Come to think of it, using slide rules was a real advantage for this kind of reasoning.) We were always doing back-of-the-envelope estimates for problems he’d throw at us.
The other thing he did was introduce us to unit analysis. If we thought we had a way to figure out the answer, forget the numbers for a minute, just work through the units and see that it actually makes sense. If you’re trying to figure out grams/liter of a solution you’re making, and when you work out the units and discover it’s coming out liters/mole, you know you’re doing it wrong.
Simple, basic stuff. You ought to have absorbed this into your bones in grade school if you want to be a scientist.
So look at that graph. The X axis is years, which is OK, even if the inconsistency of the intervals is extremely annoying. But what are the units of the Y axis? What’s being measured? I have no idea. I presume it’s a stacked percentage of something, but that’s unclear. Information produced? Absorbed? Thrown at a wall and forgotten? What kind of information? It’s all lumped together and unspecified. Could we have some units, please? And can you really categorize a single unit of information that applies appropriately to what comes from a newspaper and what comes from a social networking site?
The other data we’re missing is a source and methodology. If it’s saying that someone in 2009 is getting 10% of their “information”, nebulous as that means in this context, from blogs, how was that determined, and where are the raw data that was used to compile this chart?
Surprise — there isn’t any. This whole chart was built out of some guy’s impressions. There are no numbers and no sources and no measurements were made. It puts up a colorful pretense of being quantitative, but there’s nothing but vapor and handwaving there. Mr Thompson would have been horrified.
And then this imaginary data is used to extrapolate imaginary trends into an imaginary future and make unbelievable predictions, which everybody seems to believe. I really don’t get it. If a student put this kind of garbage on my desk, I’d at least draw big red X’s across the pages and slap an “F” on it; I’d be tempted to set it on fire, throw it in my trash can, and piss on it. You cannot build plausible predictions from garbage data.
So, I must be an alien, because no one else seems to be expressing visceral disgust at this kind of nonsense, except for Larry Moran, who probably is also an alien. I’ll have to see how many extraterrestrials are lurking in my comments section now.
The graph has been much improved.
I took the test, and it said,
You are a heady mix of the most evil Popes – Paul III, Benedict IX, Urban II and “Hitler’s Pope” Pius XII.
Oops. I knew I shouldn’t have admitted that vanilla was my favorite ice cream flavor in that last question.
A new bill has been proposed in Scarolina. Here it is:
TO AMEND ARTICLE 1, CHAPTER 29 OF TITLE 59 OF THE 1976 CODE, RELATING TO GENERAL PROVISIONS CONCERNING SUBJECTS OF INSTRUCTION IN THE STATE’S PUBLIC SCHOOLS, BY ADDING SECTION 59-29-15, TO PROVIDE THAT CURRICULUM USED TO TEACH STUDENTS ABOUT THE ORIGINS OF MANKIND MUST MAINTAIN NEUTRALITY BETWEEN RELIGIOUS FAITHS AND BETWEEN RELIGION AND NON-RELIGION, AND TO PROVIDE THAT CURRICULUM THAT DOES NOT MAINTAIN THE REQUIRED NEUTRALITY MUST BE REVISED OR REPLACED AS SOON AS PRACTICABLE.
Be it enacted by the General Assembly of the State of South Carolina:
SECTION 1. Article 1, Chapter 29 of Title 59 of the 1976 Code is amended by adding:
“Section 59-29-15. (A) The General Assembly finds:
(1) that the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution makes wholly applicable to the states the First Amendment’s mandate that Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of or prohibiting the free expression of religion;
(2) that the individual freedom of conscience protected by the First Amendment embraces the right to select any religious faith or none at all;
(3) a proper respect for the First Amendment compels the State to pursue a course of neutrality toward religion, favoring neither one religion over other religions, nor religion over non-religion or the inverse;
(4) that atheism is a school of thought that takes a position on religion and the existence and importance of a Supreme Being;
(5) that the United State Supreme Court recognizes atheism as equivalent to a religion for the purposes of the First Amendment; and
(6) that teaching atheism or any of its principals, including, but not limited to, the denial of the existence of a Supreme Being, as a philosophical system of beliefs or in a manner that affirmatively opposes or shows hostility to religion, thus exhibiting a preference for those who believe in no religion over those who hold religious beliefs, violates the First Amendment.
(B) The State Board of Education shall examine all curriculum in use in this State that purports to teach students about the origins of mankind to determine whether the curriculum maintains neutrality toward religion, favoring neither one religion over other religions, nor religion over non-religion, including atheism. Related to non-religion, the examination must include a review as to whether the curriculum contains a sense of affirmatively opposing or showing hostility to religion, thus preferring those who believe in no religion over those who hold religious beliefs. The duty to review curriculum imposed by this section is continuing and must reoccur periodically after the initial review in order to assure compliance with this section.
(C) If the board’s examination determines that any curriculum fails to maintain the neutrality required by subsection (B), the offending curriculum must be revised or replaced as soon as practicable, but no later than the beginning of the next academic year.
(D) This section does not prevent classes being taught pursuant to Section 59-29-230.”
Let’s pare that down to its hard kernel of illogic.
The US government is required to be neutral on religion. Hooray!
Atheism is non-religion, therefore it is a religion. What?
The school curriculum must be reviewed, and anything that teaches religion or non-religion must be revised or replaced.
Oh, by the way, we exempt courses that teach about the Christian Bible from this requirement.
This lovely muddle of confused thinking was composed by Senator Michael Fair, who is a conservative (given) Republican (of course) insurance agent (which makes him qualified to pass laws on education and science, I suppose).
We can also distill the bill down a little further.
Schools can’t teach anything that doesn’t support my sect’s religious views, because that would be a violation of the First Amendment.
(via Sensuous Curmudgeon)
In all the news about Obama’s choice of an appointment to the Supreme Court, there’s another possibility looming:
Francis Collins, the geneticist who led the Human Genome Project, is close to taking over the top spot at the National Institutes of Health, according to areport by Bloomberg News.
Collins, who was the director of the NIH’s National Human Genome Research Institute from 1993 to 2008, is in the final stages of being screened by the administration of US President Barack Obama, an unnamed source told Bloomberg.Elias Zerhouni, Collins’ would-be predecessor, voiced his approval for the pick, telling Bloomberg that Collins has “done things many scientists wish they could do once in their lifetime, and he’s done it repeatedly.”
Collins recently unveiled a new foundation, BioLogos, that promotes “the search for truth in both the natural and spiritual realms, and seeks to harmonize these different perspectives,” according to the organization’s Web site. Collins, who is an evangelical Christian, has said that his new foundation is an attempt to resolve Christian faith with scientific evidence, especially with regard to evolution. In 2006 he published a bestselling book, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief, that stirred some controversy in the scientific community.
I didn’t see much “controversy in the scientific community” over that book; I think everyone agreed that he had a perfect right to express his religious views, and there was near-unanimity that they were the views of a gullible fruitbat…an opinion confirmed by his wacky Biologos website. I know he had a good reputation as an administrator of the human genome project, but do we really need to go back to the Bush years of god-walloping goofballs at the head of every major government agency?
There are some objections being raised in the comments that have made me feel like I have to expand on this.
Collins is extremely well qualified for this job. If all we did was look at his CV to see if he’s competent to administer the NIH, I’d say they’d be hard pressed to find a better guy.
I don’t care if the director goes to church. If that’s what he wants to do as a hobby on sunday mornings, no problem.
However, and I think this is a great big HOWEVER, Collins also has a tremendous amount of religious baggage. This is also a political position, and it is fair to look at all the other stuff he brings into the job, and I’m afraid Collins is more than just a guy who goes to church…he’s a religious freak. I’ve read his book, and I’ve browsed his website, and he’s waving a great big hairy ideological flag in addition to his perfectly commendable credentials.
Look at it this way. If we had someone who had an administrative record as good as Collins’, but who was as overtly and proudly atheist as Richard Dawkins, everyone would be doubtful about Obama’s judgment as I am right now — they’d be rightly wondering if this hypothetical candidate would be a diplomatic dead duck…not to mention the right-wingers would be out for his head. Somehow, because Collins happens to be weirdly Christian, we’re supposed to simply overlook the fact that he struts about with his underpants on his head?
Well, Collins is not going to have my confidence, that’s for sure. His writings reveal a man with an extraordinarily poor grasp of scientific reasoning and a surprising lack of understanding of evolutionary biology (his argument that morals could not evolve, for instance, is stunning in its ignorance). I also suspect that he’s going to use this position as a laurel to peddle religious nonsense. I’m assuming he’d have the decency not to do it while he’s in office, but afterwards, it’ll be a stock part of the credentials he will trot out to validate his bogus beliefs, never mind that a large number of the scientists he will be working for think his apologetics are utterly loony.
We’re having some major performance problems, as is obvious from all the errors you’re getting when you try to post comments. We had some substantial tweaks made to the code behind the scenes that was supposed to improve performance, but actually had exactly the opposite effect — now Scienceblogs is supposed to be bringing in some expert consultants very soon now to fix the problems, either rolling back the code or figuring out why we aren’t getting any speed boost at all. I don’t know when this will happen, since there are a lot of blogs here, and they all need to be patched somehow. We’re all feeling a bit frustrated by the mess.
Almost always, though, when you post a comment, it is getting added to the database, even if it does bounce back with a timeout error or some other noise. Please don’t just go back and repost the same comment again and again. Go back, reload the page, and see if your comment has appeared first.
The gullibility of the religious is amazing…but they always seem to be rewarded with the fawning affirmations of other believers, and more publishing opportunities. Yet again, the Huffington Post flaunts its absurdl woo side with a piece of tripe from Therese Borchard claiming that angels exist.
As you sit there reading this–whether you believe it or not–there is an angel by your side: it is your guardian angel, and it never leaves you. Each one of us have been given a gift, a shield made from the energy of light. It is a part of the guardian angel’s task to put this shield around us.
To God and the angels we are all equal; we all deserve to be protected, to be cared for, and to be loved, regardless of what others might think of us–good or bad. When I look at someone I can physically see this shield around them; it’s as if it’s alive.
Your guardian angel is the gatekeeper of your body and your soul. He was assigned to you before you were even conceived; as you grew in your mother’s womb he was there with you at every moment, protecting you. Once you were born and as you grow up your guardian angel never leaves your side for an instant; he is with you when you sleep, when you are in the bathroom, all the time–you are never alone. Then, when you die, your guardian angel is there beside you, helping you to pass over.
No, there is no angel next to me. There is no tangible, visible, magical agent here in the same room; I can’t smell it, hear it, feel it, see it, and if I stub my toe there will be no winged seraph to kiss it and make it all better. We could scan this room with all kinds of scientific instruments that can look at wavelengths well outside the limitations of our eyes, and there would be nothing there — I’d be surrounded by a corona of infrared radiation, but in the rest of the room, nothing but a layer of bacteria and nematodes, a cloud of dust mites, and perhaps the occasional housefly.
Yes, I know, if I confronted a fan of belief in angels, they’d tell me my material scientific tools can’t see something spiritual, but then I’d have to point out that their eyes are also merely material tools, and she has claimed to be able to see the ‘shield’ of angels. Is she lying? If we had two angelists viewing this room at the same time, but unable to communicate with each other, they’d give two different accounts of what is going on. They are making it all up.
This whole elaborate mythology of guardian spirits floating about in your vicinity is a lie, and these frauds who claim knowledge of their existence are faking it every step of the way.
But all they have to do is say it confidently, and make sure it’s a pleasing myth, and fools will eat it up.
